"Salud, Camarada," the guard said to Robert Jordan and put out his hand. "Are you well?"
"Yes," said Robert Jordan. "And thee?"
"Equally," the guard said. He was very young, with a light build, thin, rather hawk-nosed face, high cheekbones and gray eyes. He wore no hat, his hair was black and shaggy and his handclasp was strong and friendly. His eyes were friendly too.
"Hello, Maria," he said to the girl. "You did not tire yourself?"
"Que va, Joaquin," the girl said. "We have sat and talked more than we have walked."
"Are you the dynamiter?" Joaquin asked. "We have heard you were here."
"We passed the night at Pablo's," Robert Jordan said. "Yes, I am the dynamiter."
"We are glad to see you," Joaquin said. "Is it for a train?"
"Were you at the last train?" Robert Jordan asked and smiled.
"Was I not," Joaquin said. "That's where we got this," he grinned at Maria. "You are pretty now," he said to Maria. "Have they told thee how pretty?"
"Shut up, Joaquin, and thank you very much," Maria said. "You'd be pretty with a haircut."
"I carried thee," Joaquin told the girl. "I carried thee over my shoulder."
"As did many others," Pilar said in the deep voice. "Who didn't carry her? Where is the old man?"
"At the camp."
"Where was he last night?"
"In Segovia."
"Did he bring news?"
"Yes," Joaquin said, "there is news."
"Good or bad?"
"I believe bad."
"Did you see the planes?"
"Ay," said Joaquin and shook his head. "Don't talk to me of that. Comrade Dynamiter, what planes were those?"
"Heinkel one eleven bombers. Heinkel and Fiat pursuit," Robert Jordan told him.
"What were the big ones with the low wings?"
"Heinkel one elevens."
"By any names they are as bad," Joaquin said. "But I am delaying you. I will take you to the commander."
"The commander?" Pilar asked.
Joaquin nodded seriously. "I like it better than 'chief," he said. "It is more military."
"You are militarizing heavily," Pilar said and laughed at him.
"No," Joaquin said. "But I like military terms because it makes orders clearer and for better discipline."
"Here is one according to thy taste, Ingles," Pilar said. "A very serious boy."
"Should I carry thee?" Joaquin asked the girl and put his arm on her shoulder and smiled in her face.
"Once was enough," Maria told him. "Thank you just the same."
"Can you remember it?" Joaquin asked her.
"I can remember being carried," Maria said. "By you, no. I remember the gypsy because he dropped me so many times. But I thank thee, Joaquin, and I'll carry thee sometime."
"I can remember it well enough," Joaquin said. "I can remember holding thy two legs and thy belly was on my shoulder and thy head over my back and thy arms hanging down against my back."
"Thou hast much memory," Maria said and smiled at him. "I remember nothing of that. Neither thy arms nor thy shoulders nor thy back."
"Do you want to know something?" Joaquin asked her.
"What is it?"
"I was glad thou wert hanging over my back when the shots were coming from behind us."
"What a swine," Maria said. "And was it for this the gypsy too carried me so much?"
"For that and to hold onto thy legs."
"My heroes," Maria said. "My saviors."
"Listen, guapa," Pilar told her. "This boy carried thee much, and in that moment thy legs said nothing to any one. In that moment only the bullets talked clearly. And if he would have dropped thee he could soon have been out of range of the bullets."
"I have thanked him," Maria said. "And I will carry him sometime. Allow us to joke. I do not have to cry, do I, because he carried me?"
"I'd have dropped thee," Joaquin went on teasing her. "But I was afraid Pilar would shoot me."
"I shoot no one," Pilar said.
"No hace falta," Joaquin told her. "You don't need to. You scare them to death with your mouth."
"What a way to speak," Pilar told him. "And you used to be such a polite little boy. What did you do before the movement, little boy?"
"Very little," Joaquin said. "I was sixteen."
"But what, exactly?"
"A few pairs of shoes from time to time."
"Make them?"
"No. Shine them."
"Que va," said Pilar. "There is more to it than that." She looked at his brown face, his lithe build, his shock of hair, and the quick heel-and-toe way that he walked. "Why did you fail at it?"
"Fail at what?"
"What? You know what. You're growing the pigtail now."
"I guess it was fear," the boy said.
"You've a nice figure," Pilar told him. "But the face isn't much. So it was fear, was it? You were all right at the train."
"I have no fear of them now," the boy said. "None. And we have seen much worse things and more dangerous than the bulls. It is clear no bull is as dangerous as a machine gun. But if I were in the ring with one now I do not know if I could dominate my legs."
"He wanted to be a bullfighter," Pilar explained to Robert Jordan. "But he was afraid."
"Do you like the bulls, Comrade Dynamiter?" Joaquin grinned, showing white teeth.
"Very much," Robert Jordan said. "Very, very much."
"Have you seen them in Valladolid?" asked Joaquin.
"Yes. In September at the feria."
"That's my town," Joaquin said. "What a fine town but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war." Then, his face grave, "There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister."
"What barbarians," Robert Jordan said.
How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he had heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, "What barbarians."
You only heard the statement of the loss. You did not see the father fall as Pilar made him see the fascists die in that story she had told by the stream. You knew the father died in some courtyard, or against some wall, or in some field or orchard, or at night, in the lights of a truck, beside some road. You had seen the lights of the car from the hills and heard the shooting and afterwards you had come down to the road and found the bodies. You did not see the mother shot, nor the sister, nor the brother. You heard about it; you heard the shots; and you saw the bodies.
Pilar had made him see it in that town.
If that woman could only write. He would try to write it and if he had luck and could remember it perhaps he could get it down as she told it. God, how she could tell a story. She's better than Quevedo, he thought. He never wrote the death of any Don Faustino as well as she told it. I wish I could write well enough to write that story, he thought. What we did. Not what the others did to us. He knew enough about that. He knew plenty about that behind the lines. But you had to have known the people before. You had to know what they had been in the village.
Because of our mobility and because we did not have to stay afterwards to take the punishment we never knew how anything really ended, he thought. You stayed with a peasant and his family. You came at night and ate with them. In the day you were hidden and the next night you were gone. You did your job and cleared out. The next time you came that way you heard that they had been shot. It was as simple as that.